The Phoenix Project

by Gene Kim

When we increase the number of developers, individual developer productivity often significantly decreases due to communication, integration, and testing overhead. This is highlighted in the famous book by Frederick Brook, The Mythical Man-Month, where he explains that when projects are late, adding more developers not only decreases individual developer productivity but also decreases overall productivity. On the other hand, DevOps shows us that when we have the right architecture, the right technical practices, and the right cultural norms, small teams of developers are able to quickly, safely, and independently develop, integrate, test, and deploy changes into production. As Randy Shoup, formerly a director of engineering at Google, observed, large organizations using DevOps “have thousands of developers, but their architecture and practices enable small teams to still be incredibly productive, as if they were a startup.”